Starting Christmas Early This Year

I love Christmas.

This isn’t news to anyone who knows me. My birthday is very close to Christmas and your birthday and Christmas are the two best things EVER when you’re a kid – so like every other kid who celebrates them, a love of my birthday and Christmas is something I’ve had with me since, well, forever. I just never grew out of it.

Having written that, I’m not one of those people who starts decorating for Christmas in September. I enjoy all of the holidays. I look forward to Halloween and sitting outside handing out candy. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite days because aside from having a good meal there aren’t any expectations for that day. Just a great reason to be with family and enjoy the day.

I appreciate each of these holidays separately and agree with people who start complaining in October (and sometimes September) about the stores decorating for Christmas. There is a pattern that isn’t so difficult to follow if you’re in retail. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas. I have no problem waiting until December to start celebrating Christmas.

Okay, that’s kind of a lie.

Growing up, my third favorite day of the year (after Christmas and my birthday) was the Saturday after Thanksgiving. No matter what was going on in our lives, my mother would get my father to drag out the box with the Christmas tree and even if no other decorations went up in the house the Christmas tree went up and got decorated on that day. It’s a tradition my parents brought well into my adulthood only altering it because, as it goes with just about everything as you get older, life sometimes gets in the way.

So like so many others, I’ve been trained to connect the end of Thanksgiving with the beginning of Christmas (my parents can’t take all the credit there – thanks, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade).  No one will argue once Thanksgiving is over it’s too soon to be thinking about Christmas. So why the heck did I buy a picture of Santa Claus on November 4th?

I’m not really sure.

Today I found myself in the Christmas Tree Shop. Not a place I usually patronize. But there I was wandering the aisles, listening to Christmas music (it was the in-store music playing) and gazing upon the gold and red and green decorations surrounding me at every turn. It sucked me in.

As I’m currently in the position of paying closer attention to how my money gets spent than I usually do, I knew buying everything that grabbed my eye was out of the question. I just wandered around noting things that were pretty or unique and thinking about how maybe I’d come back in a few weeks and see if the stuff I liked was still there. (Chances are it won’t be and I’ll probably have forgotten what things I liked anyway so it works out for the best.) But I couldn’t take my eyes off of this picture.

I share with my mother a fascination for depictions of Santa Claus that incorporate the religious aspects of Christmas. There have always been various incarnations of Santa at the manger in my mother’s house and once I saw this I knew I had to have it.

So it now hangs in my mother’s dining room, among all of the Thanksgiving decorations. Family members will come and go from now until Thanksgiving asking why it’s up already and my best response is just ‘because I hung it up.”

I’m not trying to rush Christmas and I’m truly looking forward to Thanksgiving, but sitting in my mother’s dining room and looking over at this photo gives me a rush of happiness like when I was a kid. I’m apparently more excited for Christmas this year than I realized so Santa stays up – and I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself choosing the Christmas playlist on my iPod sometime soon.

(Note from Cyn: A little digging on the Internet produced two useful pieces of information. The name of the print I purchased today is These Gifts are Better than Toys and the artist’s name is Steve Henderson.)